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Thursday 4 December 2008

Mind Your Language

Dot Wordswoth delves into the language of Narnia

It was either Kung Fu Panda or Prince Caspian, so I took my nephew and niece to the latter. Aunts are only flesh and blood. A trailer for the Panda film featured him exclaiming ‘Awesome!’ Strangely enough this word is used in C.S. Lewis’s novel, about Aslan’s How, though not in the film. Awesome does not appear in the Bible (although awe does, four times, always in the phrase ‘stand in awe’), but Lewis meant it in the sense that the Authorised Version expressed by dreadful, as when Jacob declared: ‘How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God.’

I could see that changes in connotation would be a problem for the screenwriters. Lewis’s remark that ‘Caspian felt very queer’ would amuse knowing children now. But I’m not sure why the children in the film should not use expressions like ‘By Jove!’ (passim); ‘Well I’m jiggered!’ (chapter 2); ‘Great Scott!’ (chapter 2); ‘sucks for him’ (chapter 8) and so on. After all, scenes of London in the film were made to look just like the 1940s (though, for reasons too American to elucidate, the boys wear long trousers, instead of shorts as Pauline Baynes has them in her illustrations for the book).

I was irritated by the exclamation ‘Sorted!’, inserted into the film not carelessly, but made a sort of refrain. This was wildly anachronistic, in attitude as well as vocabulary. The prosodic intonation of the children’s speech was also unmistakably 21st-century, though admittedly audiences today would jeer voices sounding like something from Brief Encounter.

Names that the film retained sounded convincing enough. The truth is that Lewis was not too hot on proper names in his mythopoeic fiction. In Prince Caspian, the usurper’s wife is called Queen Prunaprismia, with its absurdly inappropriate nod to The Importance of Being Earnest. A mole in the book is called Clodsley Shovel, an awkward play on the name of the 17th-century admiral.

On the other hand, in film and book, Tarav and Alambil as names of Narnian planets are convincing, the latter suitably enough seeming to be Arabic, just as the language of the Narnians is given in English. But Pulverulentus Siccus is a good name for the author of a dull grammar, and a better use of Latin than J.K. Rowling usually manages. It does not make it into the film, and would have been inaudible if it had, above the continuous noise of battle scenes in Dolby stereo.

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